WordCamp 2007: Matt Cutts, Whitehat SEO Tips for Bloggers [en]

*Here are my notes of [Matt’s session](http://2007.wordcamp.org/schedule/search-engine-optimization/). Might be inaccurate, blah blah blah. Oh, and RSI, so might be a bit short. Check out the [post on Matt’s blog](http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/speaking-at-wordcamp-later-today/) too.*

**Update, August 2007:** Matt wrote another blog post in which you’ll find [links to his Powerpoint presentation and the video of his talk](http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/whitehat-seo-tips-for-bloggers/).

Google doesn’t hate your site. [Some guy](http://alexchiu.com) invented an immortality device (with magnetic rings). His site looks like the love-child of Geocities and MySpace. He claims to have been repressed by Google because of the immortality device. No! Instead, view the source of the page. Ugly things hidden in it! Hundreds of words in a tiny textarea! Hence, the penalty.

Good plugin: [SEO Title](http://www.netconcepts.com/seo-title-tag-plugin/) (swaps the name of your blog with the name of your post).

Don’t put your blog at the root of your domain:

– what if you want something besides a blog?
– people link to main page and main blog page, so you get some extra links that way.

Think about it.

Call your blog “blog” and not “wordpress” — you never know if you might switch.

What do SEOs know that bloggers might not?

**Keywords**

What might people be typing to search for your stuff? example… “[lol kittens](http://flickr.com/photos/tags/lolkittens)”! Don’t spam, but if you know what people are searching for, there are perfectly natural ways of slipping them in your posts. Use synonyms! *steph-note: it’s also better writing than repeating the same words over and over again.* Use this knowledge for good, not for evil!

Use category names which are good keywords. Dashes are best to separate words. Then underscores. No spaces is dreadful.

But wait! If everything is already in place, don’t completely mess up your urls to change. Leave the old stuff as it is, and make the new stuff better.

Use alt tags, or the blind guy at Google will get really angry. 3-4 relevant words. Keep it short.

Q: does having .php .html .asp in the URL make a difference?

A: nope. just avoid .exe 😉

Dynamic URLs are treated just as static URLs. However, keep the number of parameters low.

Should I do an audio podcast, or a video? Well, depends on how pretty you are. If you’re not sure, try hotornot.com.

A: Not too bad, but WP does suffer a bit from the fact you can get to a post from 3-4 different ways. Will have WordPress wishlist at the end of the talk.

Make sure post creation dates are easy to find.

Q: Does Google care about the number of slashes in a URL? (Date in URL)

A: Google doesn’t care about link depth.

**Moving to a new IP**

1. Reduce your DNS time-to-live
2. Back up your site, bring it up on new IP.
3. Watch Googlebot and user traffic until they fetch the site from the new IP address.
4. Take down the old site.

*steph-note: heck, will be doing that soon.*

Q: for mobile/iPhone, different site, or different stylesheet?

A: if you can, different stylesheet.

A2 from public: use Alex King’s wp-mobile plugin

**Moving to new domain**

– use a 301 redirect

better:

– do 301 on one subdirectory and when that is ok do the rest
– write to everyone and ask them to update their links (useful!)
– standardize www or [no-www](http://no-www.org/) but don’t use both, also slash/no-slash

**Free Google tools**

– webmaster console
– feedburner (you can get feeds.mydomain.com rather than feeds.feedburner.com with MyBrand for free *steph-note need to do that!!* so you can leave feedburner…)
– custom search engine
– adsense
– google analytics

**Webmaster Console**

It’s at [google.com/webmasters](http://google.com/webmasters)

A famous web publisher used robots.txt to blog Google completely, then called in a panic “what’s the matter! Google is blocking me!”.

You can see crawl errors which can give you hints on making your 404 handling better. Also, tell Google what your preferred domain is (www or not).

“Get noticed, then get traffic from Google” rather than “Get traffic from Google, then get noticed” (*steph-note: yay, exactly the position I defended in a whitepaper on search optimisation for a client!*)

Thanks for putting this up! There’s a good guide as to how spotting Wikipedia defaces can help with SEO efforts at Search Engine Land, http://searchengineland.com/070717-113550.php. What’s “liveblogging”? Is there any chance of a brief synopsis of the whitepaper on getting noticed that you mentioned?

Why is my job, your job or anyone else’s job to fix the flaws in Google’s algo. They make quite enough money and have more than enough people to stop getting other people to do thier work for them for free

I see what you mean about problems with the comments form. I was saying that the parts of the post that I could understand were indeed useful. I wanted to say that checking what searches led people to my sites has been very helpful in knowing how to title blog posts and what text to include so that people can find the info they need. However, at my personal blog I have found that people have gotten there by googling things like “knitting sluts” — I know they must be very disappointed when they actually reach the page.

Cool, thanks for the summarised version, defo not got time for 1 hour video. All sounds great and in line with my thoughts on best practice. My only sorta query is about why not to use wordpress in the root of your domain. I know people might decide to do different things latter, but if you are a blog, mainly and foremost, why would you put it in a subdirectory. I personally think that the pro’s of having it as root uot weigh the cons.

I guess the main question to ask here is “Why can’t you just 301 the pages if you decide to change”?

I think the entire issue of SEO is a confusing one. Seems like everybody is confused by what exactly it means and the whole whitehat vs blackhat issue… Even readying Google's guidelines leaves you scratching your head on a number of issues…. I guess that happens in any new industry.

Does this mean that hidden texts are really easy for Google to recognize today? Well, one good thing I know of is that deep linking and trackback spam linking has lessened because I don't receive so much by the hundreds of those anymore these days. (sigh) and (deep breath)

Cool, thanks for the summarised version, defo not got time for 1 hour video. All sounds great and in line with my thoughts on best practice. My only sorta query is about why not to use wordpress in the root of your domain. I know people might decide to do different things latter, but if you are a blog, mainly and foremost, why would you put it in a subdirectory. I personally think that the pro’s of having it as root uot weigh the cons.

Thanks so much…even still this helps me out… one thing I don’t agree with though is the tip to NOT put your “blog at the root of your domain”. I think you should if that is the main focus OF the domain..